The present invention relates generally to the field of telecommunications and related systems. More particularly, the invention is directed to a method for more effectively routing universal international free telephone phone numbers.
Recently, a new international standard numbering plan for toll free telephone numbers was developed and is known as the Universal International Freephone Number ("UIFN") . The UIFN allows a company or individual to have the same telephone number worldwide and have it work anywhere in the world. The format of UIFNs is, for example, 011-800-XXXX-XXXX.
Today, when a UIFN is dialed inside the United States, the Local Exchange Carrier ("LEC") does not have any way to determine which carrier the UIFN customer has chosen because there is no database from which the International Record Carrier ("IRC") of the UIFN call can be determined. Thus, the LEC routes the call to the Primary Interchange Carrier ("PIC") associated with that telephone. If the PIC is an international carrier, it then routes the call. If the PIC is not an international carrier, its hands the call off to an international carrier who routes the call.
In the United States, there are four international carriers: (1) AT&T; (2) MCI; (3) Sprint; and (4) LDDS. If the call is destined for termination inside the United States, the call would be routed to its destination by the carrier to which the PIC hands the call as discussed above, not the UIFN customer's carrier. This arrangement causes a number of problems. International carriers may not know where to route the call and simply be forced to drop the call. Other problems include the requirement that each UIFN customer may provision for terminations from all four international carriers. It may also mean that the customer receives up to four bills, one from each international carrier who handled their calls during the billing period. In addition, any contractual or usage discounts offered by the UIFN customer's carrier will most likely not be honored by the other three carriers and the customer probably would pay more for the calls completed by them.
One way to resolve the above noted problems is for each of the international carriers to share customer information. For a number of business reasons, however, sharing of customer information may not be practical.
Another problem associated with the UIFN plan as now implemented is that if Time-Of-Day routing, or other popular routing features are desired, a coordinated effort with all four international carriers is required both initially and whenever a routing or other change is made.
One method of routing international telephone traffic known in the prior art is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,406,620 which also is assigned to the assignee of the present application. This patent, however, describes only a method of routing calls between countries and does not disclose any techniques for routing UIFN calls. Accordingly, this patent does not resolve any of the above noted problems associated with UIFN call routing.
For the above reasons, the current implementation of the UIFN plan is not efficient and overly expensive to the customer. Accordingly, there is a great need in the art for an improved method of implementing the UIFN system.